I have finally gotten my laptop’s Aironet 350 card to work with WEP, a major victory. It’s still a bit awkward though. The big stumbling block was a setting that I’ve found the card always defaults to when loaded. Basically, in the /proc/driver/aironet/eth1 directory (the card is configured for eth1) under Config, the WEP is set to encrypt. According to the manual, WEP can be set to open, encrypt, and shared. Shared is what I needed for shared key encryption; encrypt does who knows what, but my WRT54GC router won’t support it, and I suspect many other routers won’t either. This is probably why I couldn’t get the thing to work in Gainesville on the apartment’s router wirelessly. So, with the router set to shared key encryption and my card set to same, the old thing finally worked! Even using the system-config-network GUI wizard in CentOS! Isnt’ that something? I didn’t have to enter the key through the kludgy way, in the proc filesystem; you just need to ensure the thing is input in hex format. Not too big a deal. However, for reasons unknown to me, 128 bit WEP just plain won’t work; only 64 bit does. Very frustrating for me; WEP isn’t the best thing in the world for security, but you work with what you’ve got, and only having 64 instead of 128 bits is pretty annoying. Why not 128? Supposedly this thing is capable of it. More fiddling might produce an answer, but I doubt it.
Job searching is going well; I got treated to lunch at Cheescake Factory at my first interview. Then I ended up with a job offer for 40k a year at a busy, happening place close to home with me learning AutoCAD. And, I just got another phone call today. W00t!